During the run-up to the November election between President Joe Biden and the former guy, Fox News and other conservative propaganda machines went back to the only playbook the Republican party has used for decades—scandal mud-slinging. Having not spent the last 30-plus years building a boogieman out of Joe Biden (as they had with Hilary Clinton), the Hail-Mary attempt at tilting public opinion away from President Biden was to push a scandal surrounding the reported finding of the soon-to-be President’s son. Hunter Biden, who has had a long and well documented history of addiction issues and a complicated divorce, gave the right wing rags the promise of just enough seediness to mix with the implication of some vague whiff of impropriety on the part of Joe Biden during his tenure as Vice President next to Barack Obama.

It was all hot garbage, and most of what was leaked showed a man with a lot of problems and messiness, guilt and shame, recovery and stumbling. One of the most vociferous sounds to rise out of the ultra-conservative cacophony machine was Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. It wasn’t a surprise as Carlson has shown himself to be willing to do and say anything in the service of libertarian and right-wing nihilism, as long as he maintains power and financial support.

Guess what? Weird story. According to Vice and the Daily Mail, wacky former Trump conspiracy theorist, Lin Wood—who has been attacking everybody and everything not named Lin Wood of late—claims to have access to and has posted all kinds of screen grabs. Those screengrabs purport to be correspondence between Hunter Biden and Tucker Carlson. If real, and they have not yet been verified, they show a very close buddy buddy-type relationship between two pretty wealthy guys. In fact, Tucker seems to have asked Hunter to write a college recommendation letter for his son, Buckley.*

*Every time—barf.

The correspondence seems to cover a period of their friendship between 2014 and 2016. Here’s the exchange where Tucker “can’t thank you enough for writing that letter to Georgetown on Buckley’s behalf. So nice of you. I know it’ll help. Hope you’re great and we can all get dinner soon.” Buckley ended up going to another college and graduating about a year before Tucker made the baseless claim that Hunter Biden had ‘kiddie porn’ on his computer? No good deed and all.

Another email exchange seems to be connected to the sad period during the dissolution of Hunter Biden’s marriage. At one point the DailyMail itself wrote up in its most scandalous prose, about the possibility that Hunter Biden was involved in an extra-marital affair. Real tabloid dirtbag stuff. Biden contacted Tucker. Tucker seems to have attempted to intervene on Biden’s behalf, writing “This whole thing is disgusting and awful and it breaks my heart that you all have to go through it. I’m really sorry. Let me know if there’s anything [Carlson’s wife] Susie and I can do to help.”

Whether or not these leaked screenshots are real remains to be verified. However, Tucker himself, as well as his wife, admitted to having a relationship with the Bidens that was intimate enough for Carlson to say he would not involve Hunter in his attacks. That, of course, seems to have changed. In the final days before the election, Tucker Carlson teased out a long-awaited explosive interview, where he would produce all kinds of proofs revealed through the Hunter Biden laptop showing that Joe Biden had used his office as Vice President in an inappropriate manner. Then Carlson shockingly (not shockingly) claimed his treasure trove of Hunter Biden secrets had mysteriously disappeared. Maybe it was the deep state? Maybe he read the fine print and saw that the treasure trove of secrets he was sitting on were mostly about how close a buddy he was the man whom he now smeared in the name of Donald Trump.